Austrian retailer removes Microsoft's consoles from its store following Xbox Game Pass...

Microsoft’s recent announcement that it was introducing changes to its Xbox Game Pass subscription service may have been welcomed by users, but retailers aren’t too pleased. One Austrian company has gone so far as to delist “all Microsoft consoles” from its online store in retaliation.

Launched back in June, Microsoft’s Game Pass works in the same way as other services like PlayStation Now and Origin Access. In this case, users pay a $9.99 monthly subscription to access over 100 games. It's often likened to Netflix, only for gaming.

Most of the available titles on these services are many months or years old, and, as was the case with Andromeda on Origin Access, include more recent releases that weren’t too successful. But Xbox head Phil Spencer earlier this week announced that all new Xbox One exclusive games published by Microsoft Studios would be available to Game Pass subscribers on the day of launch. Sea of Thieves will be the first of these on March 20, with State of Decay 2, Crackdown 3, and the next Halo, Forza, and Gears of War entries to follow. The new games include Xbox Play Anywhere titles that can also be played on the PC.

Unsurprisingly, retailers are far from happy about the plans, which could see fewer people buying expensive new releases at their full price, opting instead to use the Xbox Game Pass. It’s led to Innsbruck-based retailer Gameware removing Microsoft’s consoles from sale.

Speaking to German website Gamesmarkt, the company said it did not see why it should keep selling the machines, "which bring zero profit and only expenditure if Microsoft alone then wants to profit off of the sales of software."

“If you want to do business alone, you should do the work alone," it added.

Gameware boasts 370,000 customers, though Microsoft is unlikely to be worried about the effects of its decision. But if more retailers start protesting against the Xbox Game Pass changes, the Redmond company might start paying attention.

I've been patient with this for years, Xbox really needs to reevaluate why they lost this generation. Things like backwards compatibility were awesome, but it seems like they really trying to push out physical copies and just paying-once for software, which ill avoid. I have way too many subscriptions as it is. This stores logic makes sense too.

I got a Switch recently could honestly, with a improved online ecosystem, easily replace my Xbox at this point. I'm not really one for the "lol no games" meme, but they keep adding buggy or half-baked features without fixing the crappy parts of the ecosystem or trying to nail more good games. I wouldn't be surprised to see the switch easily surpass xbox sales, and I'd hope that would be a wake up call to Xbox.

I'm no fanboy, and the xbox isn't a terrible system, but im tired of xbox trying to force this system on everyone and im tired of xbox constantly making promises they cant keep. Phil Spencer has been in charge for almost 4 years and we have almost nothing to show for it outside of backwards compatibility and a machine that plays the same games at 4k.

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While I see the decisions that Microsoft made at the launch of the xbox one as being the real reason they are losing this generation (higher priced weaker console, forced kinect). I agree they now need to focus heavily on games, the xbox one x should carry them well into the next 4 years or so hardware wise. The chose to practically make a whole new console in the xbox one x was what kept them losing this gen.
Dropping the kinect and matching sony in price was great first steps, bringing most peoples favorite xbox 360 games to the xbox one at potentially no extra cost was a great move. These were strategic moves by Microsoft to move the mass amounts of xbox 360 gamers away from there console and move onto something new, a good chunk went PS4 at it's launch, but both the PS3 and X360 have huge online player bases still. Now Microsoft is hardware king in the console world, they went way over the top imo in the design of the xbox one x. It's great it's small and all but why waste the time and money engineering that? Now they need to dump as much if not double that amount into new games, they have to compete in the exclusives areas, and that really means creating new IP's more than anything, while continuing the current ones. In the meantime they can go back to having the relationships they had with the 3rd party devs and get exclusivity on EA and Ubisoft games for 3-4 weeks ahead of the PS4.

Smart move and as microsoft wants a monopoly on gaming they will probably start paying the store to sell their console. They don't care about the money as much as market share, when they dominate the market they can get all the money and it's not like they will run out of it any time soon so they can take as many years as needed. It's a good thing apple has no interest in games....

Omg get them some tissues. Really. Boohoo. Did they act like this when netflix came out?

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Did you even read the article? They only make profit from the game sales. It's not worth supporting by retailers if their revenue stream is gone. They will support other platforms. Microsoft is burning physical stores. Will it be worth it?

Then that retailer will lose money. Xbox gamers will go elsewhere. Silly

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xbox makes its profit off software, not hardware. If a store cant sell software, and they dont make profit off hardware, why sell hardware? dont quit your day job. At the end of the day, its about how fun games are and anyone who obsesses over logistics like FPS and resolution in casual gaming tends to forget that.

"lel totally different systems" uh yea? no ****. One has fun games and one has good looking third party remasters. Ill just upgrade my PC the next time I realize I care about graphical fidelity. This gen, with all its high and mighty 4k power, has done nothing with it to make games more fun.

Omg get them some tissues. Really. Boohoo. Did they act like this when netflix came out?

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Did you even read the article? They only make profit from the game sales. It's not worth supporting by retailers if their revenue stream is gone. They will support other platforms. Microsoft is burning physical stores. Will it be worth it?

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Think people migrated to digital long before this move.
Forza 7 has 5m MAU, GoW4 had 6.4m active users in one event, and if you compare these 2 numbers with vgchartz...
It makes no sense to buy any physical if you own multiple devices (I have Alienware desktop, Alienware NB, Surface Pro, xb1, xb1x and looking forward to dock a small ARM on my gamepad for portable gaming later this year) to run games from MsStore tbh. And it's the very same reason why I dropped PsStore and Steam (also movie from PlayStore).

Omg get them some tissues. Really. Boohoo. Did they act like this when netflix came out?

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Did you even read the article? They only make profit from the game sales. It's not worth supporting by retailers if their revenue stream is gone. They will support other platforms. Microsoft is burning physical stores. Will it be worth it?

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Think people migrated to digital long before this move.
Forza 7 has 5m MAU, GoW4 had 6.4m active users in one event, and if you compare these 2 numbers with vgchartz...
It makes no sense to buy any physical if you own multiple devices (I have Alienware desktop, Alienware NB, Surface Pro, xb1, xb1x and looking forward to dock a small ARM on my gamepad for portable gaming later this year) to run games from MsStore tbh. And it's the very same reason why I dropped PsStore and Steam (also movie from PlayStore).

Switch has too many flaws so I'll wait.

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Indeed, I love the ability to play the same game on my pc and xbox with a single purchase. The majority of my games are digital nowadays, something I thought I'd never buy into at the start of this generation.

This gamepass initiative is fantastic for the consumer. Retailers have the right to be pissed but that's their perogative.